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Saturday, 28 January 2012

I think I can safely say that whoever
calls you Auntie Beth or Your Excellency is not very
likely to call you Elizabeth or pooky-schnookums as
well. Although you may respond to all four forms of address, being
addressed in different ways doesn’t mean that people can’t decide
who you are: it means that different people have learnt to address
you appropriately. The same is true of whoever calls you Mary, Maria,
Marie or Mei Li. Accepting to be addressed in different ways is not a
symptom of split identity, it is evidence that you have learnt to
acquire different identities, which suit you at different times and
in different ways.

Identities are social constructions,
negotiated through and with other people. Our identity, to my mind,
is composed not so much of what we are as of what we are
being, depending on where we are, when, why, and with whom. Much
like clothes, we need to change out of a few identities and into a
few others in order to fit our daily needs. We also grow in and out
of identities: I still remember the first time someone referred to me
as “the lady over there”, instead of “the girl over there”,
and I still remember the cafeteria attendant at the school where I
took my first degree seamlessly switching from “Madalena”, his
usual form of address to me, to “senhora doutora”, the Portuguese
title we bestow on graduates, as soon as it became clear to him that
I had also switched from student to lecturer. It wasn’t until I had
those labels applied to me that I realised that they did indeed apply
to me: their appropriateness to my identity was new to me.

This flexible process of acquiring,
losing and/or complementing features of our identity is the reason
why it might make better sense to talk about individual identities, in the plural,
because speaking of identity in the singular makes it look like
there’s a single one which either etches itself onto an individual
from womb to tomb, or should do so. This is also why suggestions that
those of us who are multilingual and multicultural may have split
linguistic and cultural allegiances cannot make sense. “Split” in
relation to which integer(s)?
Hyphenated identities only make sense if we believe that
non-hyphenated ones not only exist but exist as default. Being
multilingual and multicultural does not involve unlawful encroaching
upon territories which rightfully “belong” to other people
either, because there is no copyright in languages or in cultures.
Whatever the number of languages that we happen to use, we’re not
made up of bits and pieces of someone else’s behaviours, we’re made up of our own bits and pieces.

We actively enact the process of
acquiring our identity, as Robert Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller
argued in their book Acts of Identity.
Their observations among Caribbean Creole speakers and among West
Indian communities in London led them to conclude that our wish to be
identified by others in specific ways drives our social interaction:
we act to create the image of us that we want others to have, and we
do this through our uses of our language(s). Michèle Koven, in her
book Selves in Two Languages in turn observed how
the use of different languages impacts both the ways in which we
express our identity and the ways in which others perceive it.

As we grow up, we learn to shape our
persona(lity) through progressive adjustments to the ways other
people see it fit to engage with us and, in turn, to the ways they
allow us to engage with them. Children will naturally experience
glitches along this path. They may, for example, inadvertently
project an image which does not fit them, not because they haven’t
yet learnt how to assert their identity, but because they haven’t
yet learnt how to use their language(s) in order to do so. The next
post will have something to say about this.

Saturday, 21 January 2012

Words which come prefixed with “multi-”
give the impression that “multi-” refers to ‘many, different,
varied’, and therefore that the same words can be used with some
contrasting prefix referring to ‘one, same, uniform’. In some
cases, multi-words appear to make some sense, examples being
multimedia or multinational. In other cases, I wonder:
what does a word like multitasking contrast with, and what
might contrasting concepts refer to?

Multi-monotasking?

Photo: MCF

Another such word which provides me
with much food for thought is “multicultural”. Your culture can
be defined as anything that you are and do which is not determined by
your genetic patrimony. That is, what you are and what you do because
you’ve been nurtured to be so and do so. Cultural behaviours are
localised in time and space, which is why we find phrases like
Victorian culture or Asian culture. But big words like
Victorian and Asian refer to analytical concepts, whose
vagueness ends up turning them into stereotypes. As we know,
analyses, including cultural analyses, are made by the big shots of
their time – often for other big shots of all time. Real-life
culture is small in both time and space, because the groups which
socialise us into it are also small.
We eventually develop into culturally local individuals.

Our languages are naturally part of our
cultural patrimony, because they are there to serve socialisation
into the practices, physical as well as intellectual, which
characterise the people in our environments. The locality of cultural
behaviours is what explains that languages associate with neither
countries nor cultures, one to one, and that attempting to attribute cultural portraits to nationalities
says more about the portrayer than about the culture or the
nationality. More than one language is used in virtually all
countries, and the same language is used to express widely different cultures. The same locality also explains language variation, whether
geographical (what linguists call dialects) or social
(sociolects). There are northern, and southern, and regional,
and urban, and so on varieties of the same language; and we don’t
speak in the same way to our childhood’s best friend and to the
head-hunter who just found out about our ideal profile for the latest
starvation-wages job.

This means that we all use our
languages, one or more, in many, different, varied ways, in order to
satisfy many, different, varied cultural needs, and this is why I
find it quite baffling that only part of humankind somehow got to be
labelled as “culturally and linguistically diverse”, or as users
of “heritage languages”. Aren’t we all? The belief that
mystifying labels such as these refer to relevant facts, and the
related effort to make sense of what doesn’t make sense takes time,
and human, administrative and financial resources. Not to mention, of
course, the expectations about linguistic and cultural proficiency
which we go on pasting on those people whom we’ve got used to label
in this way. I develop this argument in a book chapter,
Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children,
included in a collection dedicated to assessment of speech disorders
in multilingual children.

There’s more to any individual than
the singularity of the pronoun “I”. Being “multicultural”
doesn’t mean being a patchwork of cultural bits and pieces which
“belong” to other people,
and which besides stand in conflict with one another. It means
behaving according to the cultural conventions which make sense
around us. The next post explains how the conflicts which presumedly
afflict multilinguals and multiculturals arise from the implications
of the prefix “multi-”.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

Some time ago, I listened to an
interview on Swedish radio, where the guest was a best-selling
novelist. The novelist was Swedish, officially, by which I mean that
he had one of those hyphenated nationalities whose left-most half
sticks to you no matter how long and how well you have been
naturalised into the right-most half. That’s what happens when you
choose to label people by means of locations, and then decide that
locations identify people.

The Swedish-Swedish interviewer steered
the conversation along the well-trodden tracks of chats with writers,
asking things like when his literary epiphany had manifested itself,
and whether/when/how he had been able to turn book-writing into a
livelihood. There followed a sample of equally standard questions
which are asked of multilingual writers in countries where the
standard persuasion is that everyone within their borders is
standardly monolingual, mono-ethnic and monocultural: why had the
immigrant emigrated, how had he managed to gain such command of
Swedish, so late in life and in such a way that he wrote
highly-regarded literature in the language, all of this duly
interspersed with the usual awed noises about multilingual proficiency.
And then, the million-dollar question: Känner du dig svensk?
(‘Do you feel Swedish?’).

I don’t know whether the interviewer
had any more questions in stock, but this one ended up being the
interview’s last question because the novelist didn’t answer it.
This is one of those information questions disguised as yes-or-no
questions, like “Could you tell me the time, please?” or “Haven’t
we met before?”, whose modus operandi you can read about in Chapter
10 of The Language of Language. The short of it is
that a simple yes-or-no answer is no answer, although a definite
yes-or-no turned out to be what the interviewer demanded. The
novelist started by talking a little about Swedish traditions that he
had learnt to cherish, and about Other traditions that he no longer
cherished, and expanded a little on how and why, to no avail: Ja,
men känner du dig svensk?
(‘Yes, but do you feel Swedish?’). So he talked some more, about
differences and similarities between Otherness and Swedishness, that
likewise were neither yesses nor noes, until time was up.

The impression that
lingered on at the end of the interview was that the novelist had
refused to answer an important question, one which was so important
that the interviewer had in turn refused to let go of it. I wondered.
What does it mean to “feel” a nationality, and a single yes-or-no
nationality at that? Like if you’re a twin, and someone who
isn’t asks you what it feels like to be one: what do you say? I
wondered what the interviewer would have answered, if the novelist
had countered with something like “Do you?” There seem to
be “proper” answers to questions like these, which have less to
do with what people actually feel than with what people are expected
to feel. Which doesn’t mean that the questions make sense. I’ve
also lived in Sweden (on and off, admittedly), I’ve also written in
Swedish (though not books, let alone novels), I’ve also adopted and
shed a few Swedish and Other traditions, and I can’t answer the
question either. Perhaps I am not entitled to be asked this question
anyway, because I am not “Swedish”. But do I feel “Portuguese”,
which I am? Hmm....

Like many of us, the interviewer
appeared stumped by two things. First, the evidence of a competent
user of a language which is not “his” – with literary elegance
to boot. That’s what happens when you choose to assign ownership to languages,
and then decide that ownership doesn’t transfer. Second, the
assumption that a Swede, even (or perhaps especially) an Other-Swede,
should be able (or willing) to answer questions about things “Swedish”.
That’s what happens when you haven’t had a chance to read my
previous post.

What happens in real life, then, where
people own different languages for the same reasons that they own
different clothes, relate to what these languages represent in
different ways that make different everyday sense to them, and feel
at home, also in different ways, in all of them? The next couple of
posts deal with these matters.

Saturday, 7 January 2012

If you’re familiar with one of the
great figures of 20th century literature, my fellow
countryman Fernando Pessoa, you must have
recognised the title of this post as a tribute to him.

Pessoa didn’t question that his
homeland was his language, though: he stated it. In his autobiography
of sorts, Livro do Desassossego
(‘Book of Disquiet’), he wrote that “Minha pátria é a língua
portuguesa” (‘My homeland is the Portuguese language’). Far
from me to engage in the speculation surrounding what Pessoa meant
by this, but I like the idea that your language, any of your
languages at any given time and place, feels like home.

Languages are not just sets of
conventions to express meanings, they also reflect those meanings
which their users find relevant to express. This is why we talk about kräftskivor in Swedish
and about fado in Portuguese, but not the other way around. (I
had to say this: in case you haven’t been told, my beloved,
multi-rooted, multi-cultural, and very Portuguese fado gained recognition among UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage
just recently.)

Nevertheless, it doesn’t follow that
a Portuguese-Swedish multilingual, say, will relate to both
kräftskivor and fado – or to
whichever local practices these languages reflect. In order to feel
at home in a culture, you need nurturing
in that culture, a point made by Una Cunningham in her book Growing Up with Two Languages. Both the
languages and the ways of living those languages need input,
so that they can be made ours.
You can find out more about this at Una’s website, where you can
also listen to parents’ and children’s reports about their
cross-linguistic and cross-cultural experiences.

Nurturing is something that people
do, according to the practices of the groups to which they belongat specific times and in specific places. The places, however,
instead of the people, somehow came to be seen as the owners of
cultural practices – and so as the owners of people, too –, in
the sense that you “belong” somewhere. “Somewhere”, in turn,
came to mean not only ‘a single place’, usually the one where
your mother happened to give birth to you, but a homogeneous place –
in the sense that if you belong to Portugal, say, then you relate to
fado. But there’s fado and fado,
actually, both of which are Portuguese because the two places where
they come from, Lisbon and Coimbra, respectively, happen to be
located in the piece of land we call Portugal.

The problem with defining who you are
by means of a place is that places are, well, stuck in
place, whereas you and your languages aren’t.The association of (one) land with (one) identity didn’t
hold water for Fernando Pessoa either. Like many literary figures
past and present, he used several languages, and published in them
too. But it was his “homeland” which spoke in multiple ways
through the different voices of his heteronyms, all of
them Portuguese. Granted, these were literary personae, but there’s
no difference between what they represent and what all of us do in
everyday uses of a single language:
there is more than one way of being at home in any single language.

Small wonder, then, that so many of us
find our home in different languages too. I never understood the
funny claim that belonging to more
than one place means that you don’t in fact belong anywhere: having
several homes doesn’t mean you’re homeless. And it doesn’t mean
either that you must belong to one place more than to another, in a
replay of the myth that you must also have one language that tops them all.
So what happens when someone can’t accept, or won’t
accept, that people don’t need to belong, or don’t want to
belong, to a single place – and perhaps don’t care about issues
of belonging? The next post gives one example.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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